The head of Windows and Windows Live engineering group at Microsoft Corp. said in an interview that the company was on track to release next-generation Windows 7 operating system in early 2010, which is later than the timeframe which William Gates named earlier this year, but seems to be the final plan and deadline. What the exec did not say is nothing about the feature-set or concept of the forthcoming operating system (OS).

“We said we’d be out there with a release of Windows 7 three years after the general availability of Windows Vista [by January 2010]. We’re excited; the investments that we have are really about producing a major and significant release at that time,” said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live engineering group at Microsoft, in an interview with News.com web-site.

Earlier this year Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates said that the operating system would be sometime available in 2009, though, many believed that he was referring to a release candidate version or a version for enterprise customers who have their own deadlines for implementation of operating systems and new computers.

But with the availability timeframe of Windows 7, which is code-named Vienna, set, even more questions transpire. Will the new OS support new file systems called WinFS, which was originally promised to be a part of Windows Vista, or will the new system feature more advanced search functionality? Those are the questions Mr. Sinofsky does not want to answer, but says that every customer is going to find something positive about Windows 7 and that the forthcoming OS is a major release for Microsoft, which means a lot of novelties implemented.

“I don’t want to talk about any more specifics today, because we’re focused today on how we’re going to communicate things. But really again to really make sure I’m clear, we’re working on a major release, and I think that each customer segment will have its own way of understanding what it means for them to be a significant release. Some of the things that we’re going to do are going to make the release more applicable to a broader set of people, but it also might mean, oh, well, if you’re not re-architecting the whole thing, then maybe it’s not a major release. But we’re actually going to bring forward the compatibility, and we’re going to make sure that there’s a lot of value for everybody who’s a customer of Windows 7,” explained senior vice president at Microsoft.